There is an easy answer to the question raised in the title of this article. There is no set number or price that a company can give to a client that is seeking for an affordable SEO service with associated promises. Be wary of online marketing companies that promise certain results in the search engines for a certain price. There are many variables at play with the search engines of today. Truly, this type of marketing is one of those services in which a client needs to determine a budget that is dedicated toward online marketing. Both SEO and SEM (Pay Per Click) require various amounts for online advertising based on the competitiveness of the term in which the company would like to optimize for.
Businesses that are seeking a company to perform online marketing should carefully analyze what it is that an online marketing company promises them. Any company that promises a number one position, or front page ranking for such and such a dollar amount is seeking only to take your money. This industry is directly related to the competitiveness of the term, the competitiveness of the industry, and the amount of money a company is willing to pay in order to achieve a top spot in Google.
Companies that are serious about marketing online should perform an evaluation on their competition. They should consider an ROI test and determine whether the time and cost involved in seeking a top spot in Google will yield the type of business that will create a profitable situation once that company has taken the top spot.
If a company is looking for a set price for SEO, most companies will be able to offer a starting point in which SEO tactics can begin, or they can quote a company a set number of Google clicks through pay-per-click. Most SEO companies will begin their price point at about $ 100 dollars and go up from there.
This amount of money will give a company a basic level of on-page optimization and a couple of blog entries or article submissions in order to start developing some quality back links. If companies are serious about SEO, they will look at spending anywhere from $ 500 on the low end and $ 5,000 on the high end for an affordable SEO service. Companies that highly heavy on SEO traffic can spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on generating search engine traffic.
The lesson to learn here is that no single company can guarantee anything in SEO. There are too many variables. You can bet on SEO being expensive if you wish to compete with big companies for competitive terms. However, a good affordable SEO service can target long tail keywords that are less competitive and subsequently less expensive to rank for which can give you a good chunk of the industry you are trying to target.